Three former Anglo Irish Bank officials face maximum sentences of five years each this afternoon for conspiring to conceal or alter bank accounts being sought by Revenue.

Former chief Operations Officer Tiarnan O'Mahoney, former company secretary Bernard Daly and former assistant manager Aoife Maguire were found guilty on Thursday on all charges by a jury after nearly seven hours deliberations and a two month trial.

A sentencing hearing began at noon today during which the court heard a summary of the case from an officer from the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation. The judge will hear mitigation arguments after lunch before moving on to sentencing

Prosecuting counsel Dominic McGinn SC told Judge Patrick McCartan that O'Mahoney and Daly face five years for the offence of giving false information to Revenue.

The remaining counts are conspiracy to commit an offence which is a common law crime and thus has no prescribed maximum sentence. However two of the actual offences carry five year terms and the prosecution said the protocol is for the judge to be guided by these.

One of the offences they conspired to commit, that of defrauding the Revenue, is not on the statute books in Ireland but the court heard the equivalent offence in the UK carries a ten year maximum.

Judge McCartan indicated he will treat the maximum for all offences to be five years as they all related to the same scheme.

The charges alleged that in 2003 and 2003 they conspired to hide or omit accounts, connected to Anglo chairman Sean FitzPatrick from Anglo's Core Banking System (CBS) or from documentation provided to Revenue, who were conducting an investigation into bogus non-resident accounts which may have been liable for Deposit Interest Retention Tax (DIRT).

There was a delay in taking the verdict yesterday because of an anonymous phone call to the office of the DPP saying that the jury foreman's wife was “very friendly” with Maguire. Judge McCartan decided that it was a hoax call after the jury foreman denied the claim.